[Yale-readings] Thursday, March 6, 12:30: Novelist Lydia Millet, LC 319

[Nancy Kuhl]

>
>The English Department presents a reading by acclaimed novelist 
>Lydia Millet, 12:30 p.m., Thursday, March 6, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 
>63 High Street, room 319.
>
>Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, most recently How the Dead 
>Dream (Counterpoint). Her fifth, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, was 
>shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Prize, and an earlier 
>novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Also 
>an essayist and critic, Millet lives in the desert outside Tucson, 
>Arizona, where she works as a writer and editor at the nonprofit 
>Center for Biological Diversity.
>
>She will be reading from her new novel, How the Dead Dream, the 
>first book in a trilogy, which introduces T., a young developer with 
>a reverence for money and the institutions of capital. Always 
>restrained and solitary, he has just fallen in love for the first 
>time when his orderly, upwardly mobile life is thrown into chaos by 
>the appearance of his unbalanced mother, who comes to live with him 
>after his father's sudden desertion. In the wake of a series of 
>devastating losses, T. begins to nurture a curious obsession with 
>vanishing species, and is soon breaking into zoos at night to be 
>with animals that are the last of their kind.
>
> >From reviews of How the Dead Dream:
>
>"The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an 
>experience that precedes language itself."
>
>-- Salon
>
>"It's hard, in fact, to convey how invigorating Millet's fiction is, 
>how intelligent and thematically rich, how processes of thought are 
>themselves made urgent and lively through the specificity of her 
>observations and sentences that offer startlement, small and large. 
>This isn't fiction that tells us how to live. Instead, it dramatizes 
>the power of attentiveness to an expanded, if terribly flawed and 
>potentially dying, world, attentiveness being a kind of tenderness, 
>which is a kind of love."
>
>-- The Globe and Mail
>
>"How the Dead Dream" synthesizes the two styles of Millet's fiction 
>-- the harrowing and the madcap -- with a new elegance. The chapters 
>are longer, the narrative voice more coherent, and, as a result, the 
>outrage in her fiction achieves an unprecedented depth of focus."
>
>-- The San Francisco Chronicle
>
>"Wonderful secondary characters abound in this end-time novel, 
>including T.'s spacey mother, his over-the-top gay father, a saucy 
>paraplegic friend, a testosterone-driven egomaniac investor and 
>fraternity brothers straight off the set of "Animal House"...Millet 
>sees the natural world with clear-eyed urgency and the social 
>landscape with wisecracking, dark humor. How the Dead Dream is an 
>edgy telegram on behalf of nature and its singular beasts. As Millet 
>writes: "The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was 
>passing unnoticed." "
>
>-- Kansas City Star
>
>"How the Dead Dream focuses on the quiet existential crisis that 
>arises from living in a dying world... Yes, there's an argument for 
>environmental protection here, but what more profound is Millet's 
>understanding of the loneliness and alienation in a world being 
>poisoned to death."
>-- Washington Post
>
>"Millet's got a visionary sensibility, marked by a voice that is by 
>turns biting and dark. Her books take on the absurdity of 
>contemporary American culture, poking at it from the outside 
>in...Millet's sixth novel, How the Dead Dream...may finally get her 
>the attention she deserves."
>
>-- Los Angeles Times
>
>"At first, T. might seem hard to like -- he's a child who turns 
>schoolyard bullying into a business, and when he collects for the 
>unfortunate, he keeps the bulk of the take without a twinge of 
>conscience. But he's rendered in such complex, fine detail -- as 
>carefully etched as one of the engravings he studies on the backs of 
>dollar bills -- that he comes alive, irresistibly sympathetic, both 
>deadpan and deep."
>
>-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
>
>
>
>"One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation."
>
>-- Los Angeles Times (profile)
>
>"Millet, a writer of encompassing empathy and imaginative lyricism 
>and a satirist of great wit and heart, takes readers on an 
>intelligently conceived and devastating journey into the heart of 
>extinction...her extraordinary leap of a novel warns us that as the 
>splendor and mystery of the natural world is replaced by the 
>human-made, our species faces a lonely and spiritually impoverished future."
>-- Booklist (starred review)
>
>
>"A frightening and gorgeous vision of human decline."
>-- Utne Reader
>
>
>"Millet proves no less lyrical, haunting or deliciously absurd in 
>her brilliant sixth novel than in her fifth...an involving character 
>study and a stunning meditation on loss--planetary and 
>otherwise--Millet's latest unfolds like a beautiful, disturbing dream."
>
>-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
>
>
>"With wry, brilliant dialog and insightful existential musings, 
>Millet delves deep into the meaning of humanity's destructive 
>connection to nature and the consequences of the extinction of both 
>animals and love. Absorbing and not to be missed; highly recommended."
>-- Library Journal (starred review)
>
>
>"The reader's sympathy never flags...the suffering of a selfish, 
>greedy fortune-builder remains heartwrenching. The intelligent, 
>sharp-humored charm of her narrative voice aligns the reader with T. 
>from the start. In lyrical passages that trace T.'s deeper musings, 
>Millet makes the personal universal, raising the stakes so that each 
>realization has the weight of a revolution. And, like all 
>revolutions, it's an untidy process, leaving the future uncertain."
>
>-- BookPage
>
>
>"For a long time, Lydia Millet has had the makings of a great 
>novelist. At least two of her five previous books have hinted at how 
>far her gifts might take her, but her latest, How the Dead Dream, 
>brings all her strengths into an impressive balance...she has pulled 
>off her funniest, most shrewdly thoughtful and touching novel. If 
>Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, he would be extremely jealous."
>
>-- The Village Voice
>
>
>"What Millet has managed to do with How the Dead Dream and 2005's 
>wonderful atomic fable Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is to write fiction 
>that confronts social issues without falling into shrill hectoring 
>or dull didacticism...her steady hand and subtle voice are what make 
>them work as well as they do."
>
>-- The Believer
>
>
>"American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as 
>of late, but it takes a writer of Millet's sensitivity to enjoy the 
>way down this much."
>-- Eye Weekly
>
>
>--
>Pericles Lewis
>Professor of English and Comparative Literature
>Yale University
>P. O. Box 208299, New Haven CT 06520-8299
>Address for courier/on-campus: 451 College St., Room 213
>Telephone: 203-432-2732
>Fax: 203-432-0136
>Website: 
><https://webspace.yale.edu/pericleslewis/>https://webspace.yale.edu/pericleslewis/

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